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Sit down dear child and hear of languages long ago... Back I. The days of vacuum tube and electromechanical switches, when punch tape rules the world p, there

Sit down dear child and hear of languages long ago... Back I. The days of vacuum tube and electromechanical switches, when punch tape rules the world p, there were two languages: The Algorithmic Language, and the List Processor. The List Process, or LISP, to its friends was built around s-expressions. The other, also known as ALGOL, was built around a strange and unholy hybrid of text and formulae that only an insane mathematician would love, for almost every statement was a special case. ALGOL syntax went on to rule the world. Seriously kid. There are only two syntaxes, and procedural, structural, object oriented, aspect, imperative, and all the rest are immaterial to the syntax, for they refer to how programs are organized, not what keys you press on the keyboard. Don't they teach programming languages anymore?

catnaroek 11y ago
Have you heard of Prolog? (Just to mention a single language whose syntax doesn't fall in either category you mentioned. Not that there aren't others.) Also, as someone who studies mathematics for fun, I disagree with your statement that a mathematician would love a system with lots of special cases. If anything, mathematicians are willing to pay a higher abstraction tax than most other people, just to unify special cases.
- groovy2shoes 11y ago
  I've noticed that the kinds of things a mathematician might pride an elegant proof over are the same kinds of things a programmer might recognize as elegance in code as well. I think the Curry-Howard Correspondence is actually an intuitive result rather than a surprising one, and that any experienced programmer who understands formal proofs as well as they understand computer programming would eventually arrive at the Correspondence on their own, or at least a suspicion of it.
betenoire 11y ago
thanks dad. by the way, you are wrong, but you probably knew that already You've grossly oversimplified everything so nothing has useful meaning anymore.

catnaroek 11y ago

Have you heard of Prolog? (Just to mention a single language whose syntax doesn't fall in either category you mentioned. Not that there aren't others.) Also, as someone who studies mathematics for fun, I disagree with your statement that a mathematician would love a system with lots of special cases. If anything, mathematicians are willing to pay a higher abstraction tax than most other people, just to unify special cases.

groovy2shoes 11y ago
I've noticed that the kinds of things a mathematician might pride an elegant proof over are the same kinds of things a programmer might recognize as elegance in code as well. I think the Curry-Howard Correspondence is actually an intuitive result rather than a surprising one, and that any experienced programmer who understands formal proofs as well as they understand computer programming would eventually arrive at the Correspondence on their own, or at least a suspicion of it.

betenoire 11y ago

thanks dad. by the way, you are wrong, but you probably knew that already You've grossly oversimplified everything so nothing has useful meaning anymore.